Overview

Athlacer is a two-sided sports venue booking platform connecting players who want to play with the venue owners who run the courts, spanning padel, cricket, football, and tennis. Players discover venues on a map, pick a sport and an available time slot, then book and pay — with advance and remaining payment splits — directly from their phone. Venue owners list and manage their courts, set operating hours, pricing, amenities, and rules, open and block time slots, take and manage bookings, run a staff team with role-based access, and track their activity and revenue. The product spans a cross-platform mobile app, a Node.js backend API, and a web admin dashboard.

As the contract engineer leading the build, I authored the React Native app covering both the player and owner experiences across 57 screens, the Express/Prisma backend built on a 35-model MySQL data layer with push notifications, OTP authentication, and image processing, and the TanStack Start admin dashboard. A backend collaborator and two mobile UI contributors assisted along the way.

Key Achievements

The mobile app spans 57 screens and two complete role-based experiences within a single React Native codebase: a player flow covering map search, sport and slot selection, booking, payment, chat, and reviews, and a venue-owner flow covering venue creation, slot management, bookings, team access, and analytics.

On the backend, I designed and built a Node.js/Express API modeling a 35-entity domain — venues, courts, sports, amenities, operating hours, rules, discounts, bookings, blocked slots, conversations and messages, notifications, roles, and team members — secured with JWT and bcrypt authentication, OTP verification, and token denylisting for secure logout. Booking itself uses AM/PM slot grouping with per-court and whole-venue/date blocking, and each booking carries advance, remaining, and final amounts with auto-calculation, validation, and owner- or player-initiated cancellation flows.

Beyond the core booking flow, I built in-app chat with conversation and read-status tracking, integrated Firebase push notifications with device token registration and an in-app notifications center, and delivered owner analytics — activity summaries, monthly booking and revenue stats, and price/earnings charts. Role-based access lets venue owners assign roles to team members and manage staff access, backed by a dedicated roles/user-roles/team-members model. I also developed the TanStack Start web admin dashboard for back-office management, and handled image capture and processing end to end, from in-app camera, crop, and picker tooling on mobile to server-side resizing and optimization with sharp.

Technical Implementation

The mobile app is built with React Navigation (native-stack and bottom-tabs), React Native Reanimated and Gesture Handler for fluid interactions, Zustand and Immer for state, and MMKV for fast local persistence. It uses react-native-maps with geolocation for venue discovery, Vision Camera plus image crop/picker tooling for photo capture, FlashList and FastImage for performant lists and imagery, and react-native-gifted-charts for owner analytics, with networking over Axios and multi-environment configuration (local/dev/production) for scripted release builds.

The backend REST API is organized into controllers, routes, services, and middlewares over a Prisma schema of 35 models on MySQL, with multer and sharp handling image upload and processing, zod validating input, and the API documented with Swagger UI. The admin dashboard is a TypeScript web app built on the TanStack ecosystem — Start, Router, Query, Table, Form, and Store — with Vite, Tailwind CSS, and Radix UI primitives, Biome for linting and formatting, and Vitest for tests.

Impact & Results

Athlacer unifies two distinct audiences — players booking courts and owners running them — in one product, removing the need for separate apps. The map-based discovery flow through slot booking and advance/remaining payment gives players a frictionless path to a booked court in a few taps, while slot and pricing management, staff roles, and revenue analytics turn the app into a day-to-day management tool for venue owners rather than just a booking funnel. In-app chat and Firebase push notifications keep both sides connected around bookings, and the mobile app, API, and admin dashboard have been delivered and integrated as one coherent system across a year of active, ongoing development.